Fennel is such a winter staple in my home and restaurant that I am always surprised that other people don’t use it more often.

Fennel bulbs are incredibly versatile. You can eat them raw, boiled, roasted or braised. They taste good undercooked, or overcooked, with vegetables, meat or fish – or just on their own. And they are simple to prepare as long as you remove the tough, stringy outer layers.

Thinly sliced or finely diced fennel finds its way into many a winter salad at The Dock Kitchen. A little fresh lemon and raw fennel salad can be perfect with a grilled sardine or other oily fish.

I love to braise fennel slowly, in a pan with olive oil. It’s great to cook with only garlic, but you can add other ingredients too.

Fennel is often much cheaper to buy at a greengrocer or an Arabic vegetable shop than at the supermarket. Try to find big, fat round bulbs rather than thinner, stringier ones, as they are crisper and more fresh and zingy in taste.

There are two types of fennel – wild fennel, used as a herb, and bulb fennel, a vegetable. Although bulb fennel often has little green leaves on top that you can use in salads or sauces, if you dig up a wild fennel plant you’ll find it hasn’t formed a beautiful bulb beneath.

During late summer wild fennel has pretty heads of yellow dusty flowers, and in the early autumn produces delicious seeds. Fresh fennel seeds are amazing; they burst in your mouth releasing an intense anise shot.

Just throwing the dried stalks of the herb into a dish gives a lovely sweet, heady taste to a roasting fish or piece of meat.

Bulb fennel is also called Florence fennel, the name that reveals its true home. But it grows well in Britain and I often see it on allotments. You can buy fennel all year, but it is certainly best in the winter when its aromatic taste is most intense: a real cold comfort.